USB storage devices showing up in 'Drive Management' but not in 'My Computer

I've been trying to post a message on this board for about 40 minutes now , and I keep going around in circles. When I first hit 'post' I got this message:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1024 bytes) in /var/www/html/vb/includes/functions_search.php on line 220

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Then, when i clicked refresh, i got this message:

This thread is a duplicate of a thread that you have posted in the last five minutes. You will be redirected to the thread listings.

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The board seems to think my message got posted first time but i can't see it anywhere. This is my first post, therefore . Shall I keep trying or shall i just post my original message in this thread?!

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

The fact that I`m replying to you, means you`ve obviously managed to post.

Yes you should post your original message into this thread. I can always edit the thread title for you, to reflect your question/topic.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

hahah thanks! Right, here it is in all its former glory:
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TITLE: "USB storage devices showing up in 'Drive Management' but not in 'My Computer'"


MESSAGE: "Ok, let me begin by saying I don't know if this is in the correct forum as I don't really know where the problem lies, but I imagine it'd be with Windows. I'm running XP Pro btw.

SO, for the past few weeks, whenever I've connected any form of data storage device to my computer (via USB, usually USB2 to be more precise), it has failed to show up in 'My Computer' as an external drive or 'mass storage device' with its own drive letter like it used to do. I'm talking about stuff like compact flash cards in an external USB card reader, my HiMD minidisc unit and a memory stick in my PSP, all of which used to pop up in My Computer when connected. When I plug them in, the little 'found new hardware' icon pops up in systray for a few seconds, as does the 'safely remove hardware' icon, which lists the hardware connected. If i then check in 'Disk Management', the drives usually show up, but I can't access them unless I assign them a drive letter, and it won't let me assign a drive letter without rebooting. After a reboot, whatever I had connected still doesn't show up in My Computer, but i can then usually access it through Disk Management, right-clicking on the drive and then clicking 'open'.

The problem compounds in that, if anything that's not 'Disk Management' wants to access my external peripherals, such as my PSP media program or my minidisc media program, they can't see the drive as it's not recognised in 'My Computer'. I've tried reinstalling drivers for the individual devices, uninstalling all my USB controllers from device manager and rebooting to let them reinstall, i've tried all 4 usb2 ports on my computer, with and without my hub, all to no avail.

Does anyone have any idea why my computer might have stopped automatically displaying/assigning drive letters to external things as they're connected? To re-emphasize, this is only a recent problem, it all used to work fine a few months ago, and I can't recall doing anything that might have made this happen. Virus scans and spy/ad/malware checks all check out.

I've made a little picture to further emphasize/explain my problem:

(Click to enlarge)"